Hungarian Translation sample:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Hungarian letter writing samples

Hungarian Business Etiquette

Handshake is not too firm/aggressive and often a light grip with a single, quick shake.

Dress is often fashionable, whether formal or casual and they expect and are comfortable amongst those equally dressed.

Meetings are often to discuss issues, not to make decisions

Eating

Arrive on time. Do not arrive 10 minutes late without phoning beforehand.

Do not begin eating until the hostess says 'bon appetit'. (dinner parties)

If you have not finished eating, cross your knife and fork on your plate with the fork over the knife.

Do not rest your elbows on the table, although your hands should be visible and not in your lap. A man may rest his wrists, and a woman her forearms, on the table edge.

Do not cut salad with a knife and fork. Fold the lettuce on to your fork.

Peel and slice fruit before eating it, break bread before eating.

Negotiation

Do not be over friendly, the French seperate their business from their personal lives.

High-pressure sales tactics should be avoided. The French are more receptive to a low-key, logical presentation that explains the advantages of a proposal in full.

The French are often impressed with good debating skills that demonstrate an intellectual grasp of the situation and all the ramifications.

Hungarian spoken areas:

Hungary (white area)

Hungarian spoken in the border regions (light blue):

Serbia

Romania

Ukraine

Slovakia

General

Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group, namely a branch of the Uralo-Altaic language family. This means, that Hungarian has absolutely nothing to do with Indo-European languages such as English, German, Spanish etc.

Spoken Hungarian

Spoken Hungarian has distinctive gimmicks such as the so-called vowel harmony. This means, that endings correspond with the syllables standing in front of the ending. It includes certain pronunciation patterns, which are difficult to learn. Slovakian - a Slavic language has something similar, although it was heavily influenced by Hungarian.

Pronunciation is completely different to the Latin alphabet that is used. Also, there are some consonant combinations counting as single sounds, eg:cs is a single letter (see the accents in the box below)

Written Hungarian

Hungarian is an agglutinative language, ie: parts of words are combined into long sequences to form sentences. Other languages belonging to the same language family (distantly!) include Finnish and Turkish.

Q, W, X and Y are not used in the Hungarian alphabet, only in loan words and foreign words.